Weirs - I Want To Die Easy (Dear Life)

The Slow Music Movement
33 minutes ago
2 min read

The cover for Weirs' Diamon Grove album, showing a white house surrounded by lush greenery. Foreground sign reads "Diamond Grove." Overcast sky creates a serene, slightly mysterious mood.

Damn, why did no one tell me about Weirs when they dropped their debut release back in 2020? There's really no excuse, you were all at home online. Anyway I'm up with the program now, sinking into Prepare To Meed God - their great debut, enjoying the new single and looking forward to the forthcoming album that will be dropping on October 3rd.

Based around North Carolina, Weirs are an experimental, non-hierarchical collective that depending on what's happening, number from two to twelve people at a gig, are rooted in age old tradition, with a DIY ethos and a pleasing fondness for giving things a twist or two. The new album saw nine of the crew: Child-Lanning; Justin Morris, Libby Rodenbough, Evan Morgan, Courtney Werner, Mike DeVito and stalwarts Andy McLeod, Alli Rogers, and Oriana Messer squeeze into an old house on a dairy farm in 2023, and boy did those cows get a treat.

The Weirs collective and a dog pose by a "God Bless You" sign in a rural setting. They're dressed casually, with trees and fields in the background.

The lead single from the forthcoming album is a curious version of "I Want To Die Easy", one of the many early spiritual tunes that have been passed down through the generations, more "recently" via America's gospel community.

There's no sound proofed studio here, in fact the fauna of the dairy farm ring as loud as the human choir, making the recording sound like a Lomax field recording and older than A Golden Ring of Gospel's version from which the crew took inspiration. Throw in the natural reverb and everything the music schools teach about studio engineering has been gleefully thrown out the window, to be replaced by a raw, gritty charm that is a breath of fresh air in today's polished to death DAW driven world.

I don't know the present or the history of the collective, but there's a rare depth to the vocals that also sets this recording apart; certainly melancholy - that sort of comes with the lyrics, but also a sort of worldly wiseness or weariness that's usually born from oppression or at least a life less gilded, which perhaps is unsurprising from a group of working musicians ploughing traditional and alternative furrows in more rural communities. To be honest I never even knew that white gospel was a thing, the concept was something I picked up from the liner notes to A Golden Ring of Gospel's LP, but all I can say is that the genre is in safe hands, despite suspecting that the rest of the recordings will be stylistically eclectic.

Now for that album.